My Love

I only have love.  I love my husband so much.  He has done so much for me.  He has been a very supportive husband, especially when I wanted to go to school.  He encouraged me when I was at my weakest and thought I couldn't finish because I had failed my first test.  He told me, you can do it Mari, you're almost done.  I know you can do it.  Joel has encouraged me during the hardest of times and I admire him for that. He has been a very loving and caring husband and father.  The children adore him and they obey him out of respectful fear.  Joel is good at whatever he puts his mind to.  I love him.  I only have love for him, I have no other words to describe what I feel for Joel.  I only have love.

Joel is my best friend.  We spent the last 7 years of our lives together.  We have gone through many ups and downs.  We have pushed through many hard times, but throughout everything, we have held hands and got through the worst of storms together.  He is my best friend.  We laugh, we play, we watch movies together.  Most of my favourite memories in life are with Joel.  I used to think that I was in love when I was 7 years old.  Because of Joel, I know what real love is.  He loves me, and I love him.

My sister said that everything begins and ends with God.  We love because He first loved us.  I know what love is and I know how to love because I know that God loves me.  I love Joel because God loves me.  I love him no matter what happens because God loves me unconditionally.

I am not perfect and I make a lot of mistakes in life, but Joel is the first one to tell me when I am doing something wrong.  I don't take criticism lightly, he knows that.  But when Joel says something to me, I do fight back, but I listen and I learn.  I am stubborn.  I am very stubborn and I like to do things in a certain way.  Joel is the only person that could tell me, Mari, you need to do this this way.  Yes, I would fight back, but I knew he was right.  Joel was usually right a lot of the time.  It took a lot of time for me to learn how to submit as a wife, but because I loved and respected Joel so much as a husband, I was able to submit as a wife.  I do have my faults.  I like clothes piles.  I love clothes piles.  Joel was never a fan of my clothes piles. I also didn't like doing laundry.  I hated folding.  Joel was always best at the folding because of his Old Navy expertise.  I did help sometimes!!  I bet Joel hated folding laundry too, but he did it for me.  I love him for that.

I also hated doing dishes.  I get these rashes on my hands if I do them too much and then they start bleeding.  Joel always did the dinner dishes.  I would do the predinner dishes! But he would do the dinner dishes.  I loved him for that too.

I love spending time with him.  That's something I would constantly crave as a wife.  With our busy lives, Joel's 14 hour shifts, and me being in work and school, and doing homework and working from home, and taking care of the kiddos, and prepping dinner for Joel, our lives were busy.  It did become a routine, but there were the random days where we would get to spend time together, and I treasured every moment.  Joel always knew how to make me laugh.  He never not made me laugh.  He is one of the people that did make me laugh.  I'm not very easily amused.  Just by Joel.

In a marriage we both had to sacrifice so much of our needs and wants for the kids.  That's what happens when you get married young.  We had to sacrifice parts of our lives so that we could be good parents for the children.  I never thought I was missing out on much.  Joel made me so happy.  My kids made me happy.  Seeing them grow up and change, learn how to talk and walk and count, it's such a blessing.  My kids are the result of mine and Joel's love for each other.  And they are so loving, because me and Joel were so loving to each other.

Marriage is hard.  It's about two people learning how to become one.  Me and Joel are not going to always be one hundred percent in love.  There will be a lot of fights.  Big ones and small ones, but as long as we keep our love for the Lord the center of our marriage, I know that we can fight out the worst of the storms.

Everything begins and ends with God.  I will love Joel forever.  He is a wonderful father, a wonderful husband and a very loving man.  He is my heart and He is my forever.  My only love.  My love.

That's ridiculous.

Sometimes things don't work as you planned them.  I planned these holidays to go one hundred percent differently than what actually happened.  It's hard to write a blog without actually revealing what happened but secrecy is a must, for my sanity and for other people's sanity.

Therefore, as a result of secrecy, this will be a very emotional blog.  This past week has been absolute torture for me.  It feels as if someone just ripped my heart out of my body and I can hardly breathe.  Literally, it's hard for me to breathe.  It's hard for me to eat, or wake up every morning, or to go to sleep every night.  What I thought was happiness apparently wasn't.  When I thought things were okay, apparently they weren't.  At times I felt like I would rather be dead than to have to feel the pain of living.  That's how this past week has been for me.  It's hard to bounce back from such an emotional heartbreak, it really is, especially if it came out of nowhere.  I'm still somewhat in shock, hoping that I will wake up and this was all a horrible dream.  But every time I wake up, it's not a dream and my heart is still absent.

This past week I have learned about heartbreak, and now I'm learning about rebuilding.  Rebuilding my life and my heart from the very beginning.  I feel like a newborn baby, not knowing what to do, what to expect, wanting something and crying for it, and sometimes receiving nothing.  Maybe as a "newborn" I don't know what's good for me and I have to trust the Lord to take care of me and renew my strength.  I don't always get what I want.  Sometimes I expect something to happen and it doesn't and I get disappointed.  I need to learn how to trust the Lord to take care of me.  I need to learn how to trust.  I haven't been very good at that, apparently.  I have had to guard my heart for most of my life, and then when I let my guard down and feel like I can finally trust again, my heart has been snatched out of my body, tossed into the garbage, stomped on, spat upon, torn apart, ripped into a million pieces and here I am left lifeless and wandering in the dark.  That's what happens when you put your trust in people.  I need to learn how to put my trust in the Lord.  I need to learn how to love God first.  People say to guard your heart.  My heart is gone and is in the rebuilding phase.  It'll take a long time before I have a heart to guard.

My kids look at me with their innocent eyes and I don't know what to say.  I don't know how to respond to them anymore.  I feed them, I clothe them, I bathe them, I hug them, but my heart is gone and I feel like I don't know how to love them properly.  But my heart is in the rebuilding phase.  One day I'll learn how to live again, one day I'll learn how to love again.  Right now, I'm waiting on God, I'm depending on him to carry me through each day.  To give me strength to breathe in every breath.  To help me to take care of my children.  I'm depending on God to rebuild my heart.  It's just hard that once I actually let my guard down and actually trusted someone, I got hurt.  I'm scared.  I'm scared to love, I'm scared to trust.  I'm scared to be happy.  I'm just scared to live.  I don't want to be hurt anymore.  I don't want to be feeling this pain.  It's hard to live through each day.  Every day gets longer and longer and I dread waking up every morning.  God is helping me, every minute of every day, but it is a long, long process and I have to live one day at a time.  I'm not going to smile or laugh for a long time, right now it's hard to even get up.  But I have to take it one day at a time.

Maybe one day I'll be able to smile again.  Maybe one day I'll be able to laugh.  Maybe one day I'll even be able to love again.  But at this moment, for someone to expect something more of me other than just to be breathing, that's ridiculous.

How Do You Not Stress Out?

I'm tired.  I feel like all my blogs start off like this, but this time, I really am tired.  It's the last weekend before school ends which means, yes.....it means I have 6 exams this week.  One on every day of the week, and that includes Saturday.  So yes, I am tired.  Not only do I have 6 exams, I also have 2 assignments due and 1 presentation due.  So yes, I am tired.  I am spent, and I want to cry in a corner.

Not only do I have school, but I also have work, and flyer uploads and merchants and final QCing, and Job posting, all of which take up at least 2 hours a day of my time.  And yes, none of you know what flyer uploads, merchants and final QCing is and how tiring it is, but believe me it's tiring.  I also have OSing and emailing and it's just a lot of work.

Not only do I have school and work, but I also have kids.  Mateo is in his clingy phase, and by clingy I mean that I have to carry him ALL THE TIME or he will cry until your ears fall off.  It is driving me insane because I can't get anything done with a crying baby.  Josiah is in the phase where he doesn't want to do anything that I explicitly tell him to do BUT if I find a way to tell him to do something and make him think that it was his idea in the first place then he will do it.  Which takes a lot of thinking in a part of my brain that I don't really have space for.  So yes, I am tired.

Not only do I have school and work, and not only I am a mom, but I am a wife.  As a wife, it is my responsibility to take care of my husband and make sure that there is food on the table when he gets home from a hard day at work.  I have to make sure that I pay attention to him when he talks, and I have to cater to his needs and his wants and make sure that he is happy and content.  Not that this part of my life is a burden, it really isn't, and my husband helps me too, but sometimes it's hard for husbands to understand how much is going on in their wives' life and all the wives in this world can attest to what I am saying.

So right now, I feel like there is a huge world of pressure on my back.  I can't fail school, I can't fail work, I can't fail my kids, and most importantly I can't fail my husband.  It is a lot of pressure and I am tired.  I have never EVER been so tired in my life.  My body is tired, my mind is tired, I am soooo tired that I can't even sleep.  That's how busy my brain is.  I really don't think that anyone can understand how tired I am or how much I am going through right now, and I can't really talk about it to anyone because then I would be selfish venting about my life and stresses and I would be a failure because I can't handle everything.  I end up just clenching my teeth half the day, which is really bad for them.  But I clench my teeth when I feel like screaming or throwing a tantrum, but I can't.  Because what mom throws tantrums right?

This blog is more like a vent.  A very unfruitful vent.  Usually my vents end up being a life learned lesson, this one isn't really a life lesson, it's just a vent of how tired I am and how no one will really understand me and how I am so mega tired that I just want to crawl in a hole, plug my ears and hum lullabies to myself.